by Liz Jensen
My head began to throb. The King was dead, I thought. Long live the –
The what?
‘Come on!’ I yelled at Norman. Swinging into action, I grabbed him by the scruff, dragged him out to the car-park, shoved him in the Nuance and drove home like a bat out of Hell.
‘Bastard,’ said the twins in unison, when they saw me. But their faces were flushed with joy.
‘Come on, now, girls,’ said Abbie. ‘He is their father, after all. If it hadn’t been for his, er – input –’
But I wasn’t listening. I was looking at my babies. There they lay, on the bed, in four pillow-cases. I felt inexplicably humbled. And surprised. I hadn’t seen a baby since the Millennium. But I didn’t recall them looking anything like this.
‘Strange but true,’ murmured Norman.
And it was. Because the new Homo Britannicus did not take the form of four little Buck de Saviles, spiritual grandchildren of Elvis Presley, as I might have wished. Nor, as one might have expected, did it take the form of four miniature Roseblanches.
I caught a sudden whiff of mothballs, and turned to see the sour-faced woman in petticoats I’d met once before. She smirked. ‘Two miniature Violets, and two miniature Tobiases,’ she pronounced. ‘With more than a hint of towel-holder.’
‘Champagne corks’ll be popping tonight, eh, Buck?’ said Norman, wiping away more tears and slapping Abbie triumphantly on the bottom.
‘Ouch!’ she squealed, and looked nervously across at a man with a leather jacket and an earring, who was inexplicably filming the scene with the Camcorder.
‘Time for a feed,’ said Rose, lifting a baby out of its pillowcase and nestling it against her left breast. It found the nipple and began to suck.
‘Come on then, coochie-coochie coo,’ murmured Blanche, doing the same.
‘Pass us another one, Mum,’ said Rose.
‘And me,’ said Blanche.
‘Four boobs, four babies,’ they said together, and giggled.
Abbie obliged, and there they were, Rose and Blanche, on the emperor-sized bed, with the babies clamped to their breasts. I felt tears of joy streaming down my face as I watched my offspring clinging tightly to their mothers with their perfect little hand-like feet. And as they suckled, their four little tails, curled like question marks, twitched in happiness.
‘This is the future,’ said the ghostly voice of the Laudanum Empress. ‘Do your best to deserve it.’
EPILOGUE
Violet and I went to Fishforth by steam train. Nobb-on-Humber, Fib’s Wash, Coleman’s Haunch, Maggsdale, South Brill: as I gazed through the glass at the landscape I was returning to, my heart swelled with joy. In Fishforth, Violet and I climbed the hill to the Sanatorium. Seagulls and cormorants swung through the sky and a fresh wind, a sea wind, blew about our ears.
The fortress of the Sanatorium loomed above us; we craned our necks. And there he was at the window of a high, lonely tower, staring out like the Lady of Shalott. It was as though he had been waiting there, all this time, for our arrival.
We waved frantically. Then he seemed to see us. And instantly vanished.
‘I’m going up!’ I called after him.
‘Wait! I am sure he’s coming down!’ said Violet, and we rushed through the gate and up the spiral stairway. In my desperation to reach him, I quickly removed my shoes, and scrambled up the stairs on all fours, two and three and four at a time, to greet him.
‘I am Darwin’s paradox,’ I called up to him, as I saw him descending the stairs.
And he smiled down at me.
‘Or God’s joke,’ he croaked.
We met halfway. And there, on the landing, we came face to face. We stood there for a long time. His moon-face had thinned, and what remained of his hair was straggled and white.
‘I was wrong,’ he said.
But I said nothing. I was too choked to speak. Instead, I flung myself into his arms, and he held me tight.
‘ “No man is an island,” ’ he said finally. ‘ “But a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” ’
He loved Violet instantly. Not least when I reported to him that it was thanks to her that I was free of Mildred.
‘How?’ he enquired, flabbergasted. ‘Your mother did everything to rid you of that worm! Everything in her power!’
‘Mildred never existed,’ Violet announced. It was her discovery – one of which she was justly proud. When I had finally told her in detail of the bodily symptoms induced by my shameful inhabitant, her eyes had narrowed and she had looked at me assessingly.
‘And how long is it since your tapeworm has bothered you?’ she asked.
‘Since I met you,’ I told her, only realising it as I said it, ‘she has left me, mercifully, in peace. Apart from at the Banquet, when I ate something that looked like –’
‘Meat,’ finished Violet. ‘Or fish.’ She laughed. ‘Mildred will bother you no more,’ she said with certainty. ‘I have discovered that the Gentleman Monkey was a species that consumed nothing but fruit, vegetables and nuts. Anything else disagreed with him, and made his gut snarl up. You’ve inherited his alimentary system; that’s my guess. You’ve been on the wrong diet all these years, Tobias.’
Could it really have been that simple?
Parson Phelps was much impressed by this news. ‘If only dear Mrs Phelps could be alive to hear it!’ he said, and wiped a tear from his eye, then put down the yellow jerkin he was knitting, and blessed us both on the spot.
We travelled home together, all three of us, by coach, with the bulky parcel that contained my natural father.
As we left the mainland shrubs of Judlow behind us and caught our first glimpse of the herring-shaped peninsula that was my home, my heart soared.
‘See, Violet, how it is in the shape of a fish?’ I said. ‘Its tail nailed to the mainland, and its head straining out to sea?’
‘It is just as I imagined it,’ she said, breathing in the salt air. And squeezed my hand.
The arid Gudderwort, hearing of our decision to return, had already left the Parsonage, grumpily, abandoning any show of Christian goodwill. I pushed open the oak door, still warped from the Flood, and stepped into our kitchen. The flag-stones still twinkled with salt. I was glad to see that some things did not change.
While Parson Phelps went to tend Mrs Phelps’ grave, I unwrapped the Gentleman Monkey and dusted him down, while Violet ironed his shirt and pantaloons. Once we had stood him by the hearth, and I had polished his eyes, he looked well, I fancied, and in better spirits than before. Violet hung a tea-cloth in the crook of his arm. It gave him a homely look.
When Parson Phelps returned and saw him standing there, he was almost shy. He stood in the doorway with his hoe and trowel, blushing.
‘Please, Father,’ I said. ‘Come and meet him. He will not bite you.’
Finally, tentatively, Parson Phelps stepped forward on the flag-stones, reached out, and took the Gentleman Monkey’s hairy hand in his.
‘I am pleased to meet you, sir,’ he said formally. Then cleared his throat. ‘I have spent many hours thinking about you, in the Sanatorium. And I can now declare that, although I maligned you in my heart, for which I beg your forgiveness, it is now a great honour to welcome you at last’ – here he choked back tears – ‘as a part of my family.’
Violet and I cheered.
As for Dr Ivanhoe Scrapie, he never recovered from the night of the Banquet. My disappearance, along with that of Violet and the Gentleman Monkey – coupled with Scrapie’s public humiliation at the hands of Mr Darwin – gave him an emotional shock so potent that he entered a brief phase of madness, followed swiftly by death. We read his obituary in the Thunderer. ‘Scientist, craftsman, thinker, and immortaliser of beasts’, the paper called him.
Three months later, some of his favourite works of taxidermy, accompanied by the petticoated ghost of the Laudanum Empress, arrived in a huge sealed wardrobe from London. Opening its creaking door, Violet and I found an ostrich in a night
dress; a kangaroo wearing pantaloons; a wombat in breeches, and various smaller mammals, in children’s knickerbocker outfits. And the loyal corgi, Suet. He was the last animal Scrapie had stuffed, the Empress informed us as she dusted down her petticoats.
‘How did he die?’ wailed Violet.
‘You killed him,’ said the Laudanum Empress bluntly. ‘With your silly vegetarian thing. He died on the night of the Banquet.’
Violet cried bitterly upon learning this. She needed no further prompting from her gruesome mother to blame herself for his death.
‘Dog cannot live on veg alone,’ she sobbed as she stroked Suet’s stuffed and emaciated body, the husk of the dog that had been. A lesson had been learned.
‘Rest in peace, dear Suet,’ whispered Violet, kissing the corgi and returning him gently to the wardrobe.
The Empress snorted contemptuously, then began inspecting the kitchen. ‘I recognise this house,’ she said, peering into the gloom of the fireplace. ‘It’s the Old Parsonage in Thunder Spit, is it not? Look at the state of it!’ she said, kicking a flag-stone with her lace-up boot, and dislodging a little puff of sea-salt. ‘Believe me, in a hundred and fifty years you won’t know it’s the same place! There’ll be a telephone over there, and these two walls will have been knocked through, and the TV room will be just –’
But Violet had taken hold of her mother’s arm and was steering her firmly back in the direction of the wardrobe.
‘And you can be laid to rest, too, now, Mother,’ she declared, pushing her in and closing the doors firmly. ‘Go and haunt someone else,’ she said. And locked the door.
‘All right, I will!’ came the muffled voice of the phantom from within her mothbally prison. We never saw her again.
As Violet promised, the tapeworm Mildred has troubled me no more. While I have returned to the natural diet of my forefathers: fruit, vegetables, and the occasional insect, Violet’s book, The Fleshless Cook, has been heralded by the Vegetarian Society and the Times newspaper as a masterpiece of its genre, and a worthy riposte to Cabillaud’s Cuisine Zoologique: une philosophie de la viande, which proved to be a flash in the gastronomic pan.
‘And I was so sure,’ I told Violet, ‘that my mother was trying to tell me something with those gourds on her grave!’ I had told her about the foul purgative I had once made from them, to banish Mildred.
‘Perhaps she was trying to tell you something,’ murmured Violet. ‘But not what you thought. Look.’ She was pointing at a new fruit swelling at the base of a big yellow gourd flower. ‘What colour did you say the first one was?’
‘The one I planted when she was dying? Green. Green and sort of stippled.’
‘Well, look at this.’ I peered through the thick bristle-backed leaves and saw a small green fruit swelling.
‘It’s the same,’ I said. Eight years and eight generations had passed.
‘A throwback,’ she murmured.
‘Well, if it’s a message, it’s making no sense to me,’ I confessed. ‘Let us hope that the future may unravel its mystery.’
Parson Phelps went back to preaching, but it was a new message that he delivered from the pulpit.
‘My son had a tapeworm called Mildred,’ began his first sermon. ‘We were convinced she existed, and did all we could to banish her. And then the day came when we discovered she was a mere chimera, and we were delighted, but there was sadness, too, because when you house a belief, a belief so real that it feels like a being, and you discover that it was a mere product of your own desires and thoughts, then there is loss.’
He looked about the congregation. They were hanging on his every word.
‘God is like that tapeworm,’ he said. Faces began to frown in puzzlement, and there was the sound of indrawn breath. ‘An invisible presence, which we attribute to one thing. And then we discover He is the product of something else. Our hopes. Our fears. Our natural desire for order in the world. But I ask you this: Does the knowledge that He does not exist make Him any less necessary to our lives? Should we not be permitted to imagine Him? And for that figment of imagination to be so real that it becomes tantamount to fact? And then – simply – is?’
The congregation, intrigued by the parson’s new-found understanding of the meaning of life, and relieved to be rid of the excruciating and po-faced Gudderwort, came flooding back, and in St Nicholas’s Church, all the old familiar faces are there: the Morpitons, the Tobashes, the Peat-Hoves, the Barks, the Balls, the Harcourts. Parson Phelps’ sermons are passionate in a way they never were before.
Now he visits the spiritually disturbed clergy of the Sanatorium in Fishforth once a week, and shares his new beliefs with them, bringing them succour in their distress. And every Sunday, St Nicholas’s Church, which languished rudderless for so long, is full to bursting with worshippers who come from as far away as Hunchburgh just to hear him preach. In his sermons, Father doesn’t mention God by name: just the wonder of things, and the glory. And as I sit in the front pew with Violet, her hand in mine, my mind wanders to the ocean, my old childhood toy-box full of miracles. The mackerel flashing and jumping in the sunlight; the herring gulls wheeling in the sky. And there I see a Nature that is neither good nor bad, but its own pure self.
Reader, I married her.
After the ceremony in St Nicholas’s Church, which still bore the watermark from the Great Flood, I took Violet to the beach, and to my favourite rockpool, and there we lay on the barnacled rock and stared into the water. We saw baby quillsnappers, and anemones, and shrimps, and whelks. ‘God’s doodlings,’ Parson Phelps used to call them. To think, that such humble creatures are our origins. And that with every tide, and every lapping of time’s wave, everything changes, and our world wakes afresh, and all is new again. New and brave, and peopled with miracles.
Miracles. We had never imagined that we could produce offspring of our own, after what Dr Scrapie had said about the nature of the hybrid, but in this, as in many things, he was wrong. I am delighted to report that a happy event is on the horizon. Violet is now in what is termed a delicate condition.
‘I feel that it will be a girl,’ she said smilingly, as she told me the news. ‘We will have a daughter, Tobias.’ And I thought of little Tillie and felt glad.
So in our attic bedroom, Violet and I lie together on the big wrought-iron bed, and await the evolution of events.
On the mantelpiece sit the eight generations of gourd, and my whelk shell, and my fossil, and my fish-knife, and the jar that still contains my amputated tail. Above us, on the wall, hangs the picture of Noah’s Ark: God above, in a silver Heaven, with His great beard dissolving into the clouds of the flood-waters. Noah and his family on the deck. The beasts below, from mighty elephant down to humble ant.
And I think: We will call our daughter Tillie, and I will tell her the story of the Ark. But it will be a different story from the one Parson Phelps told me when I looked at this picture as a boy.
The story I will tell my daughter begins with the ocean. Huge. Ink-dark beneath a black sky. And a vessel, bobbing on the waters. A toy of wood and string.
But in this story, the Ark has no cages and no captain.
And there is land on the horizon. Look. A vast, bare continent, beneath a rainbow.
‘That continent is the future, Tillie,’ I will tell her. ‘It is waiting for us. We are its creatures.’
And a boundless hope floods my heart.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While writing this novel, I drew great inspiration from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, and Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World. I am also grateful to Nick Baker, Viv Black, Polly Coles, Valerie Jensen, Martin Lloyd-Elliott and Nick Royle for reading and commenting on the manuscript at different stages.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Liz Jensen is the author of Egg Dancing (long-listed for the Orange Prize), The Paper Eater, War Crimes for the Home (long-listed for the Orange Prize), The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, currently in development as a major motion p
icture by Anthony Minghella, and My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time. She divides her time between Copenhagen and London.
ALSO AVAILABLE BY LIZ JENSEN
THE RAPTURE
ATV Book Club Best Read
In a merciless summer of biblical heat and destructive winds, Gabrielle Fox’s main concern is to rebuild her career as a psychologist after a shattering car accident. But when she is assigned Bethany Krall, violent, delusional, cruelly intuitive and insistent that she can foresee natural disasters, she begins to fear she has made a terrible mistake. And when catastrophes begin to occur on the very dates Bethany has predicted, the apocalyptic puzzle intensifies and the stakes multiply. A haunting story of human passion and burning faith, The Rapture is an electrifying psychological thriller that explores the dark extremes of mankind’s self-destruction in a world on the brink.
‘An end-of-days blockbuster to haunt your nightmares … Unputdownable’
THE TIMES
MY DIRTY LITTLE BOOK
OF STOLEN TIME
In fin-de-siecle Copenhagen, part-time prostitute Charlotte and her lumpen sidekick, Fru Schleswig, have taken on jobs as cleaning ladies of dubious talent to tide them over the harsh winter of 1897. But the home of their neurotic new employer, the widow Krak, soon reveals itself to be riddled with dark secrets – including the existence of a demonic machine rumoured to swallow people alive. Rudely catapulted into twenty-first-century London, the hapless duo discover a whole new world of glass, labour-saving devices and hectic, impossible romance.
‘Unashamedly gleeful: a kind of topsy-turvy Jane Eyre with added time travel … Sit back, suspend your disbelief, and enjoy’
DAILY MAIL
THE NINTH LIFE OF LOUIS DRAX
Nine-year-old Louis Drax is a problem child. He’s bright, precocious, deceitful and dangerously, disturbingly accident prone. On a family day out it seems almost predestined that something will happen. But this time it is worse than anyone imagined. When Louis falls over a cliff into a ravine and lapses into a deep coma, his father vanishes and his mother is paralysed by shock. In a clinic in Provence, Dr Dannachet tries to coax Louis back to consciousness, but the boy defies medical logic and the doctor is drawn into the dark heart of Louis’ buried world. Only Louis holds the key to the mystery and he can’t communicate. Or can he?